The Striker's Chance

by Rebecca Crowley

  He flipped on the light to reveal a long, narrow room crammed with everything from soccer balls to spare goal netting to small orange cones for sprinting drills. It was dry and cool, and the smell of new leather pervaded the air.

  “I know, I know,” Kepler began, with what sounded like genuine remorse, as he perched on the edge of a table. “I’ve ruined everything. Go on, let me have it. No one can hear you yelling in here.”

  “I’m not going to yell at you.” Holly was astonished to find that she didn’t even want to. “Evan is a first-degree asshole and deserves a lot more than what you did.”

  His brow furrowed in confusion. “You’re not pissed off?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a PR disaster. Evan was deliberately trying to provoke you, and he succeeded. There are several hundred ways you could have handled that better, and I’m going to have to call in every favor I’ve got in order to clean this up.” Her smile was slow and reluctant, but she couldn’t stop it. “That said, I appreciate you sticking up for me. I guess it’s not very ladylike to wish ill on someone, but Evan is the lowest of the low, and I loved seeing him so terrified.”

  “He had no right to speak to you that way. Any decent man would have done the same,” he said with uncharacteristic humility. Then a sly smile crept across his face, and he seemed much more familiar. “Did he really look scared?”

  “Petrified would be the word. And why not? He’s seen you take down some of the toughest players in the sport. Who wouldn’t be frightened if Killer de Klerk got in their face?”

  Kepler wrinkled his nose. “I’ve always hated that name. I’m not a naturally aggressive player at all.”

  “I beg to differ,” Holly countered playfully. She realized she was flirting, and although an alarm bell was ringing somewhere deep in her brain, she couldn’t stop herself. “I’ve watched a lot of footage of your games—you definitely tend to be on the giving end of the tackle more often than the receiving.”

  “You need to watch again,” he chided. “Look for attempted tackles, not just executed ones. And bear in mind that everyone wants to go after the big, powerful striker up front because he’s the most likely to score. On the other hand, I’m impressed you’ve had a look at some old matches.”

  He put his hands on her hips and drew her in between his knees, so the edge of the table bumped against her legs. She stuck out her hands to steady herself and they landed on his thighs, which were as hard as boulders.

  He circled his thumbs on the points of her hipbones, and her face flushed as a matching heat began to simmer between her legs.

  “Did you like what you saw?” he asked.

  Holly eased her hands under the hem of his sky-blue shorts and found another pair of tight, black compression shorts underneath.

  She traced the edges with her fingertips. “What are these for?”

  “To keep my hamstrings warm,” he explained, his voice soft and husky as his hands made slow, subtle progress over the curve of her rear. “And to stop me from flashing a stadium of twenty thousand people.”

  “Now that might improve ticket sales.” She slid her hands deeper between the two layers of cloth, relishing the muscular lines of his thighs. “What other secrets do you have under your uniform?”

  His hands cupped her behind, and when he tugged her in more tightly Holly discovered that those compression shorts were no match for the strength of his arousal.

  “I’d be more than happy to show you,” he offered as her palms came to rest on either side of his narrow haunches. He gazed up at her with a coy smile on his sensuous lips, his eyes smoldering with desire. His legs were warm beneath her hands, and her nipples hardened into traitorous peaks as he squeezed her rear through her skirt.

  A shoe squeaked on the linoleum floor on the other side of the equipment room door, and her heart seized in a moment of panic at the thought of someone bursting in to find them. Her pulse slowed as she remembered locking the door, but the moment was gone. She withdrew her hands and placed them squarely on Kepler’s chest to keep him from pulling her any closer.

  “We’re not doing this.”

  “Doing what?” he asked playfully, but she shook her head. His smile faded and he dropped his hands. She took a decisive step backward. “You’re going to spend all night killing Evan’s story,” he said, rising. “And tomorrow morning you’ll hate me again.”

  “Kepler, I never hated you,” Holly admonished, but he was yanking his shorts back into place and starting toward the door. He raised the bolt, pulled open the door and gestured into the hall.

  “After you.”

  Holly stared out at the empty corridor, suddenly feeling the weight of the crisis that awaited her beyond the doorway. She drew a deep breath, straightened her shoulders and marched through.

  * * *

  Holly tossed back the last of the white wine and set the glass beside her laptop. She’d spent several hours pulling every string she possibly could to mitigate the damage that the confrontation in the pressroom was bound to do to Kepler’s image.

  It was just past midnight, and she thought she’d finally gotten ahead of the story. She’d had to promise the reporters from the Recorder’s rival papers two different sets of exclusives, neither of which Kepler would be thrilled to deliver. But it would be worth it when their positive coverage tomorrow morning made Evan’s article look petty and bitter.

  Luckily Evan had made a few enemies in his career, and the clumped mess of people involved in the incident meant the photos didn’t have the kind of immediate, obvious impact newspapers usually preferred. They would appear in the Recorder tomorrow, for sure, but the photo editor at one of the other papers told her Kepler’s hand on Evan’s shirt was only barely visible.

  Thank God Discovery came out with a victory over Cleveland. It was much easier to excuse the temper of a winning player than one who lost.

  She picked up the wine glass before remembering it was empty and then plunked it back down. She felt full of excess energy with no way to expend it. The last few hours had been stressful, but also a major adrenaline rush. Now she was all keyed up with nowhere to go.

  Holly caught sight of the Women’s Wellness magazine, opened it to Kepler’s spread and positioned it beside her laptop. It was a good article, written in a slightly flirty tone, and the photos were magnificent. Kepler’s smile on the cover was genuine and endearing, and from the easy way he straddled the gym equipment in the interior photos it was hard to imagine he’d ever been self-conscious about stripping off his shirt.

  She slid a newspaper clipping about the restaurant launch next to the magazine. The accompanying picture showed Kepler looking country-club perfect in the blazer she’d begged him to wear, and his gracious smile gave absolutely no indication that he hated every minute of the event. His sunny good looks fit right in with the crowd of Charlotte socialites that had gathered for the launch. He could as easily have emerged from an old, esteemed family in Savannah as from an industrial seaport town in deepest Africa.

  Finally she pulled out a write-up of Discovery’s first win in Pittsburgh a few weeks earlier. The sports photographer for the Pittsburgh paper had gotten an amazing shot of Kepler with his leg extended in a powerful kick, his shirt clinging to every muscle in his torso, his face a study in steely determination. Every inch the star player Discovery wanted.

  Yet something was missing.

  Holly rested her chin on her hand as she surveyed the fruits of her labor. The image was there, coherent and consistent. Still, and although she’d had no feedback to this effect, she couldn’t help feeling that the contrivance showed through.

  She turned to her laptop and did a quick image search for Kepler’s name alongside the names of a few of the more colorful British tabloids. Her screen flooded with familiar pictures of Kepler squinting into paparazzi camera flashbulbs, ducking into taxis, always with a different woman on his arm.

  She stared at the images for a long time, trying to spot the authenticity missi
ng from her own campaign. But the longer she looked, the more she became convinced that these weren’t quite the real deal either.

  With a few clicks of the mouse she surfed to a video website and scrolled through the results from a search on Kepler’s name. She’d seen most of it before—post-match interviews, clips of his goals, a few longer interviews from British television. She flicked through them with an impatient urgency, searching for something specific but not quite sure what.

  She paused on a video several pages into the results. Its graininess indicated someone had captured it from an old recording. As it began to load she realized it was an interview from when Kepler first signed with a team in Spain almost thirteen years ago.

  The pre-interview background was all in Spanish, as were the interview questions, but although his answers had Spanish subtitles Kepler spoke English. Holly’s jaw dropped as he first appeared on the screen. His hair was lighter, his face was rounder, and his frame was lankier. At eighteen, he seemed impossibly young.

  “My mother ran an after-school study club in Kwazakhele, a township in Port Elizabeth,” he explained in a much stronger accent than he had today. “I used to kick the ball around with the other kids waiting for their siblings or parents to pick them up. I loved it. My school only offered rugby or cricket, but I was too tall and skinny for rugby and too impatient for cricket, so I was never that into sports. As soon as my foot connected with that ball, though, I was hooked.”

  The interviewer asked him something in Spanish, and he replied, “Townships are these areas we have in South Africa.” He paused, clearly trying to choose his words carefully. “I guess you might call them slums, or shanty towns, but that’s not always necessarily true. Some people live in shacks, yes, but some live in houses. Some townships have schools and roads and shops, and others are all residential. But I guess it’s fair to say most people living in the townships are quite poor.”

  Another question. Kepler smiled before he answered. “I was very young, so I never thought about the fact that the kids I was playing with had so much less than I did. That’s one of the great things about this sport—you don’t need lots of money or fancy equipment to play. Just a ball and a little bit of space. No one cared that I would go home to running water and a hot meal, while my opponent might have to sleep four to a bed on a packed-dirt floor. When the ball was in play, none of that was important to any of us. Winning was all that mattered.”

  The interviewer moved on to a question about how Kepler was scouted and what his hopes were for his career in Spain, but Holly was barely listening.

  She hadn’t needed an explanation of what townships were. She’d once seen a TV program about the young boys drafted into gangs in one of the townships near Johannesburg and the violence and criminality that defined their lives from an early age.

  She tried to imagine Kepler as a child chasing a dirty, partially deflated soccer ball through a narrow alleyway between the tin walls of two shacks. His blond hair and pale skin standing out in stark contrast to his African teammates, and peals of innocent, carefree childhood laughter ringing out from the motley crew.

  Holly stared into the darkness beyond the windows, not seeing anything as the wheels in her mind began turning, faster and faster and faster.

  She knew exactly what to do.

  Chapter Nine

  Kepler winced as he eased himself into the square-shaped leather chair. His leg had been fine during the morning’s team training session, but his hamstring had seized up while walking off the pitch. Now it emitted a dull throb every few seconds. He stretched his legs in front of him, the heels of his sneakers scraping the thin carpet.

  Holly had asked him to meet her in the Gold Mine, the exclusive luxury restaurant and viewing suite accessible only to holders of gold-level season tickets. She’d cryptically told him to wear something he could move around in, and he’d settled on a Discovery polo, khaki cargo shorts and his running shoes.

  She’d been so vague about the day’s plan that Kepler half expected to walk into some surprise PR stunt she knew he would’ve refused if given the option, but the Mine was as inoperative and deserted as it always was on a Tuesday afternoon.

  As much as he didn’t like what her job involved, he had to admit she was damn good at it. A blurry photo of him grabbing Evan’s shirt had appeared front and center in the Recorder’s Sunday edition, but the total absence of the incident from any of the other papers had given the article a surreal, almost embarrassing quality.

  That hadn’t stopped the chiding phone call from his parents, or the creepy congratulatory one from Alan Brady, but all things considered he’d gotten off lightly.

  The door swished open and Holly was there, even more stunning in person than in the increasingly erotic fantasies that kept him up at night. He’d never been more wholly consumed by his longing for a woman, and he knew she had to feel at least some of the same desire. But he wanted much more from her than a passing sexual affair. That meant he had to respect her stipulation that they keep things professional.

  For now.

  She greeted him with a warm smile, the folds of her pale blue dress whispering as she crossed the room. He realized too late that there was no way to make a smooth exit from the low, trendy chair, and he hauled himself up with more effort than he would’ve liked.

  If Holly noticed, she mercifully gave no sign. “I’ve got a surprise for you today. Are you ready to go? Let’s take my car.”

  His curiosity was piqued, yet he was still wary of what a public relations surprise might entail. He nodded toward the door. “Lead the way.”

  Twenty minutes later she parked in front of the last place Kepler expected: a school.

  “Okay, I’m definitely surprised,” he informed her as they walked up the path to the door. Laurel, the photographer from the Women’s Wellness shoot, was waiting for them at the entrance.

  “I know this probably doesn’t compare to the townships in South Africa, but we’re in one of the most deprived neighborhoods in Charlotte. Most of the students at this school come from families where the household income puts them below the poverty line,” Holly explained.

  “These things are relative. The kids here may have a better situation than the ones growing up in townships, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve help or attention. But I still have no idea what we’re doing here.”

  Laurel shook his hand when they reached her. “Thanks so much for letting me be involved in this,” she enthused, clearly unaware that he had no part in setting up whatever this was. “I’ve never shot for anything as big as the Chicago Chronicle.”

  As Laurel headed toward the front office, Kepler turned to Holly. “I think it’s time you told me what I’m about to do.”

  “The Chronicle is doing a series of articles on investment in school sports programs. I suggested they include a short piece on how sometimes lopsided investment means certain sports are overlooked, and the kids who might be great at those games miss out on all the potential benefits, particularly scholarships. Today we’re doing the photos, but later this week we’ll have a phone interview with the reporter, and you can talk about how your career was almost over before it began because your school only offered rugby and cricket.”

  He gaped at her in astonishment. “How did you know that?”

  “I have my ways,” she said coyly. “In the meantime, the teachers here have nominated five boys and five girls for you to meet today. They’re all aged ten and eleven, and they’re in a special program for kids who have nowhere else to go during the summer and whose parents can’t afford childcare. I thought you could take them through some drills, answer some of their questions. Then we’ve got a bunch of Discovery merchandise for you to hand out to them. There’s no soccer team at this school, but it’s worth at least trying to get them interested.”

  A small group of what he assumed were teachers and administrators were coming down the hall toward them, and Kepler turned his back so they wouldn’t see the p
anic on his face.

  “I don’t know anything about coaching kids,” he whispered. “I don’t know anything about kids at all.”

  “You’ll be fine,” she assured him, and stepped out to greet the school personnel.

  He followed along as they exchanged pleasantries and proceeded through the summer-empty corridors lined with bulletin boards, but his mind was a tumult of panic and terror. Both his parents were teachers, and he’d grown up listening to so many stories of unruliness, disrespect and borderline criminality that he’d long decided the teaching profession was far too hard for him to ever consider. Now he had to keep ten kids entertained and under control, in full view of the woman he was still hoping to win over, with a photographer present to boot.

  He’d played championship matches and been less nervous.

  “And we even looked South Africa up on the map, so they all know where you’re from,” the principal was saying jovially as she swung open a door and led them to a small fenced playing field covered in dry, patchy grass. Ten African-American kids in various versions of gym clothes stood in a fidgety line, and all of them looked up expectantly as he stepped onto the field.

  The principal introduced him to the kids, running through their names so quickly Kepler only caught one or two. She reminded the kids to behave then joined the rest of the adults on an unbalanced metal bench on the sidelines, leaving him to stare dumbly at his charges.

  Laurel started snapping away, and he cleared his throat anxiously. “So, hi, everyone. I’m Kepler—”

  “Hello Mr. de Klerk,” they chimed in unison, evidently trained to greet their teachers in a similar vein. Taken aback by how dutiful and perfectly in sync their voices were, he found himself cracking an affectionate smile.